Spotify for Linux

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux.

Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. Unfortunately, there are issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform so we haven’t included support for local files in this version.

As a preview release this version is still unsupported, but we’re running it ourselves and will try to make sure it keeps pace with its Mac and Windows siblings. As we haven’t found a reliable way to display ads yet, this version is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

So how do you get it? Head over to our preview page where we’ve packaged the first release as Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do, and please keep the feedback coming!

UPDATE: Spotify for Linux is now also available for Spotify Unlimited subscribers.

I have a problem with this version where, for want of a better description, the program often behaves as if on a slow internet connection. Disc images take ages to appear, tracks don’t start playing for several seconds and pause frequently during playback. Re-starting the program or re-booting the machine doesn’t help.

However, running the Windows version through Wine, everything is fine.

Thought I’d solved it: logging out and logging in again seemed to ‘unclog’ it.

Went out for a couple of hours and tried to re-start, and now the Linux preview version sticks in Offline mode indefinitely showing ‘Error 112’ (my internet connection is working), and the Wine version won’t even log on, saying something about firewall and proxy settings.

It’s a great step, but so far I can’t see any advantage over running it in Wine. In fact with this version, the volume doesn’t work, and it seems that off-line storage doesn’t either. These are all things that worked perfectly under wine.

[…] without messing with Wine. When I was researching putting Spotify on my system, I can across an official blog entry that announced Spotify for Linux. I was a bit worried because the blog said that because they […]